Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler

“How pointless real life was! In novels, events led up to something,” thought Ezra, as he scanned his mother’s diary.  “What would you say is your patients’ most common disease?” This was what Ezra later asked of his medic sister, Jenny. “Mother-itis,” Jenny replied. Their mother, Pearl, so central to their lives, yet so difficult a project for any of them, passes away to be eulogised at her funeral in a manner that was “so vague, so general, so universally applicable, that Cody thought of that parlour game where people fill in words at random and then giggle hysterically at the story that results.” Cody was another of Pearl’s three children, the first, in fact, and also the most difficult. It was, of course, the children, those that remained after their mother’s death, that were the consequences of the random gap filling that had not even recognised their mother. And then, at the end of Pearl’s funeral service, the minister announced the closing hymn, chosen by Pearl herself. “We’ll Understand It All By And By.” Perhaps she did. Perhaps.

In its quiet, essentially suburban understatement, Anne Tyler’s tale of family life in Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant is nothing less than a masterpiece. As ever with Anne Tyler, the family lives in Baltimore, is not rich, is not particularly poor and presents little that is even potentially memorable. When Pearl and Beck Tull married, they might have anticipated a shared life of convention, an expectation that might have been on the way to fulfilment when three children arrived and the progress of their father in his sales career seemed assured. But then we all take far too much for granted. Beck Tull disappeared, walked out, apparently to pursue his career via a posting that had to take him away from Baltimore. But soon this was an independent life. The letters home became infrequent, the fifty dollars he apologetically generously enclosed less dependable.

Such events might have proved earth shattering if Pearl Tull had not been such an effective, if reluctant pragmatist. For the good of her family, apparently, she made the best of things, created excuses, refused to accept that this was a separation, and chose not to offer an opinion to her children. Such a change thus becomes a different form of convention. These events are set, of course, in the mid-twentieth century and in the United States, where such occurrences were not unknown.

And so Pearl was left to raise three kids. She took a job behind a store counter and walked to work to save on fares. Cody, the eldest of the three, had always been difficult. Ezra was meeker, milder, perhaps prone to naiveté, a quality he never quite managed to grow out of. Jenny was perhaps the most capable, and talented, certainly the most obviously practical of the three. She was motivated to study, to go to medical school and become a doctor. And that is exactly what she did. Ezra took on a restaurant, the eating house of the title, though we are not to conclude that Jenny’s later eating disorders are a result of the unconventional nature of the family menu. Cody became a time and motion man, but a very successful one. He always did seem to have a desire to tell other what they should be doing.

And thus all three of Pearl´s children grow up. They survive because of, rather than in spite of their mother, but the recipients of the love feel things differently. These people live anticipatory lives, their experience of the present dominated by a view of the future as it ought not to be. These people are never “well”, only “pre-ill”. They are never “happy, only “pre-trauma”. They never enter into “marriage”, only “pre-divorce”. And yet illness and trauma only rarely visit their essentially safe lives, though perhaps inevitably divorce is somewhat more common. As adults, they continually reinterpret their past, without ever really either acknowledging it or knowing it.

What happens to these characters is the important and essential content of the book, so a review of Anne Tyler’s Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant must leave all detail to be discovered by the reader. But eventually what happens is far less important than how it happens. The book’s currency is the complexity of the relationships between and amongst these family members. And these inter-relationships, though often both predictable and dysfunctional as well as avoidable are described by Anne Tyler in truly beautiful, economic prose via the shared events of their fictional but illustrative lives.

But it must be recorded that Ezra inherits a restaurant, and several of the family encounters that form the spine of the story take place over the dinner table. Not every dish served up is to everyone’s individual taste, but when did individual preferences count for anything when the collective of family is so strong? Even when superficially it might appear weak… As time passes, it becomes clear that it might not just be the food that might be described as a “concoction” when these family members get together.

Anne Tyler’s genius lies in her ability to make the mundane captivating. These people could live next door. They are not gentry, not celebrities. They are not really achievers and, at least on the face of things, might not possess any feature that might be described as outstanding. But then that is entirely Anne Tyler’s point. They are ordinary people of their time but, as individuals and then because of that collective we label “family”, they are of course unique, And their lives consist of never-to-be-repeated attempts to solve the challenges their unique circumstances generate. They offer no great surprises, no significant crimes, no earth-shattering traumas, and witness no particular history. But their lives continually change, develop, disintegrate, reform and surprise. In Anne Tyler’s work, life itself is the plot and the family is its landscape.

Ladder Of Years by Anne Tyler

Delia, short for Cordelia, is the central character of Anne Tyler’s Ladder Of Years. As usual for Anne Tyler, Delia is a Baltimore resident, a wife, a mother and probably, at least from the outside, a pillar of strength and dependability in both family and community. The children are growing up. Which children don’t? Bet then it’s how they grow up that matters, isn’t it? 

Sam, the husband, is doing moderately well. Moderate seems to be the word, as far as Sam is concerned. He’s hardly made a success of the business he inherited from Delia’s father, but the family survives to inhabit a middle class, rather liberal niche in the common psyche. As Ladder Of Years opens, the family is holidaying by the sea and Delia is dressed, mentally, for the beach. And then, without warning, even to herself, she takes off. Just like that, whatever “that” might be.

She absconds. Goes missing. Disappears. There’s suspicion of drowning. A report appears in a Baltimore paper. The family fears she has come to harm. But no, she hasn’t. In fact, still dressed for the beach she is heading off to a place she doesn’t know with a stranger. It’s no particular stranger, just a stranger. Quite soon, and with new clothes, a new address and a changed life, Delia takes on a new identity. 

Though Baltimore wife and mother still lives in her head, she’s become a new Delia, single, independent and employed. In this new guise, she inter-reacts with her new community and gradually becomes part of it. Why did she leave the apparent safety, security and responsibility of her family? Not even she can answer. What slowly begins to emerge, however, is that Delia’s choice of opting out becomes increasingly one of opting in. 

By degree the characters in her new life start to become more demanding. Without needing to state everything explicitly, they start to assume Delia’s support and claim reliance upon her. She, of course, responds and finds that she now has two levels of responsibility created out of the demands of her new life and continued contact with her family. Interestingly, Delia, this pillar of support, never feels either at home or secure in either role. 

 And so it is via this scenario of identity change, relationships of dependency, insecure self-image, alongside a fixation of demand that Anne Tyler relates how Delia’s life unfolds. Delia notices a lot about people, but she’s no great analyst. Surely she’s the type to apologise before expressing an opinion, but would harbour unspoken bigotries like the rest of us. At the start of the book she seems confused. By the end, a few more rungs along the ladder of life, she apparently remains so. Perhaps the ladder is horizontal … and with irregular spacing… But then Delia has little time to consider such arcane ideas. After all, there are things to do, people to talk to, arrangements to be made, jobs to be done…

Lives In Time - The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler

For me, The Amateur Marriage represents the sixth time I have read one of Anne Tyler’s novels. On the surface it’s the story of Michael and Pauline. They meet by chance in 1941 in Anton’s, the grocery store run by Michael’s family. 1941, perhaps incidentally, is the year Anne Tyler was born. There was a war to be fought, of course, a war that affected both of their lives. But there’s a marriage, and a child, a daughter named Lindy. Others follow, a boy and another girl.

For Michael and Pauline, life progresses, as does their marriage. But twists and turns take them to places they have never visited. As with other novels by Anne Tyler, there is an obvious and consistent linearity about its time.

A reviewer has to be careful with detail, because what happens to this novel’s characters is a large part of how it happens, and thus an integral part of the book’s rationale. To some extent, a listing of the plot, event by event, would render a reading unnecessary.

But after a handful of Anne Tyler’s books, I am now convinced there is much more going on in them than mere story-telling. In the past I have found her characters shallow, rather self-obsessed, selfish, perhaps. They are people who have lives outside the family, but people who seem pre-occupied with the familiar and seem rarely to confront ideas or experience outside its apparently defining, but only sometimes reassuring confines.

And perhaps that’s the point. It is an American dream, a libertarian ideal under a microscope. It is analysed, picked apart, sometimes reconstructed. The characters are affected by political, social, economic and cultural change. Their lives are materially transformed by the same forces that lay waste and occasionally reinvent their home town, Baltimore. But they, themselves, are mere recipients of these effects, appearing to play no part in their instigation or, it seems, their analysis. They live their lives. They are pushed around by experience, jostled by life, reflect little, internalise everything, only occasionally recognising life’s potential to reform. Time thus moves on. Inevitability looms unexpectedly.

It is not a criticism of Anne Tyler, her novel or its characters to proffer the opinion that everything seems to happen in an intellectual wasteland. People go to college, do law degrees, become involved with good causes, procreate, but moments of reflection seem to be confined to what breed of dog might not provoke allergy. Perhaps that’s the point. Such things are the stuff of life. Time goes on.

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